Cailee Spaeny in Alien:Romulus [20th Century Studios]

ALIEN: ROMULUS
Directed by Fede Alvarez
Certificate: 15
☆☆

I KNOW it is deeply uncool, but I really enjoyed both the Alien prequels, Prometheus (2012) and Covenant (2017).

Those movies looked at the “Engineers” of the dome-headed super creatures, developed with a lethal pathogen to wipe out the human race. The films dealt with some big themes and had a kind of epic quality, and some half-decent actors brought a touch of gravitas.

It made it all the more of a crushing disappointment when this disappointingly childish addition to the franchise showed its true colours about five minutes in.

Born in the year the original movie was released, the main group of characters seemed to this tired old android far too young to take seriously. Picking off this bunch of low-level twerps one by one, I felt, would be to waste the time of any self-respecting face-hugger, barely worth a xenomorph summoning the energy for an inner mouth punch.

Our voyage begins on a cold and nasty-looking planet, where a group of youngsters have been imprisoned and forced to mine for precious metals with no means of escape.

This enthusiastic group hatches a daring plot to steal cryogenic travel pods by flying up to a mystery abandoned space station hovering above their planet. Facing a lifetime on a totally dark planet mining for a corporate company – without union representation – they have become desperate to build a life elsewhere.

Predictably, all hell breaks loose aboard the abandoned ship, which has a kind of escape room feel to it – with lots of different levels each presenting problems for our heroes to solve. There are big red and yellow buttons to press and face and thumb recognition technology. Strobe lights flash and smoke plumes out of vents, as large signs state the obvious like “warning”, or digital voices blurt-out “temperature critical”, etc.

It’s not all unwatchable gore: one fantastic scene reveals a surge of dozens of face-huggers and another with the lead character Rain (Cailee Spaeny) floating zero gravity-style through pools of alien toxic blood. A mesmerising finale as the doomed ship slow-crashes into the icy rings of a planet was spectacular. I would have been happier watching that scene for an hour and a half rather than this Gen-Z tosh.

We are reunited with the synthetic android Ash, first encountered by the crew of the “Nostromo” in the original Alien. An AI-created likeness of the now dead actor, Sir Ian Holm, has been used, controversially, without his permission – although his widow has said he would have approved.

I’m not so sure, given this shal­low affront to the Alien legacy.